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Why Your Kids Love Snapchat, and Why You Should Let Them

By Rachel Simmons November 5, 2015 11:42 amNovember 5, 2015 11:42 am

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In the picture that sprang to life on my phone, the girl’s hair was an unruly nest. Her eyes were crusty slits as she squinted, unsmiling, at the camera. She was still in bed, blankets askew. It is not a glamorous shot.

That’s an image unlikely to survive the unforgiving atmosphere of Instagram, where the ever-more-perfectly filtered selfie is always streaming. No, this was Snapchat: a look at teenage life as startlingly authentic as it is fleeting. Ten seconds after the photo appeared, it vanished from my phone.

Snapchat is the app that lets users share photos or video that disappear. If apps were cool kids, Snapchat would hold court in the middle of the cafeteria: Its 100 million daily active loyalists are mostly teenagers and millennials. Some 38 percent of American teenagers use it (in Ireland, a staggering 52 percent of teenagers use the app).

As some cool kids will, Snapchat made a grim first impression on parents, swiftly earning a rep as “that thing where kids send naked pictures that disappear.” But as a researcher who studies youth and social media, I know that every app harbors a unique capacity for harm — and that there is always more to the story.

In fact, I’m here to pledge my love to the gritty realness of Snapchat, and last week, researchers at the University of Michigan chimed in: A new study of undergraduates found Snapchat use predicted more positive mood and social enjoyment among college students than visiting Facebook.

I don’t gush lightly. I’ve spent years cringing at visual platforms like Instagram and Facebook, which pressure teenagers to fake the perfect life, even when they’re miserable. Snapchat, by contrast, offers users few options to beautify a post. Its scant filters — add a time, speed or location stamp, draw a crude picture with your finger, or thumb a caption — can only be plastered, clumsily, over your content. The message from the app’s creators seems to be: Document your life, not yourself.

Videos are shot carelessly in the dark, their images trembling from distracted hands. The short shelf life of these images lets teenagers abandon the need to emulate the perfectly posed celebrity, or to represent life as more fabulous than it really is. In one video, a high school athlete sits glumly with an ice pack on his shoulder. In another, a middle school girl swings the camera around her lunch table. When the camera lands on the last girl, she casually opens her mouth, and chunks of cafeteria carrot cascade out. Her friends nearly fall off the table laughing.

Most visual platforms put feedback from peers at the center of the experience. Life on Instagram, for example, is as much about the rush of scoring likes as sharing something creative with peers. Many users view likes as a barometer of popularity and even self-worth, with some even deleting posts that haven’t drawn enough attention. For tweens and young teenagers, the yearning is so powerful that many post content designed only to collect likes (the popular “rate for a like” post, for instance, offers to rate friends on a scale in exchange for a like). They may follow “Instagram stars” with hundreds of thousands of followers, observing what appear to be perfect lives that are, in reality, perfectly curated.

Not so with Snapchat, where audience participation is minimal. There is no “like” button to be found here, and no unwritten rule of reciprocity. Users have two choices to share content: post a Story, where the app will stitch together a slide show of your content from the last 24 hours; or share directly with a person or group of your choosing. You can see who watched your Story, but viewers can’t reply. That means you spend more time sharing and consuming, and less time worrying about who liked you and who didn’t.

When social media platforms first began publishing numbers of friends and followers, it elevated teenage social insecurity to new heights. Scholars like Danah Boyd of New York University pointed out that making friendship a tangible, public item also turned it into a source of comparison and competition. Why does he have 450 friends, but I have only 300? Why does she get that many likes but I get this many?

On Snapchat, it’s impossible to see how many friends another user has — or, for that matter, how many you have (you can, however, see the total number of Snaps users have sent and received). In January, Snapchat even disabled users’ ability to see the “best friends” (people they messaged the most) of other users. “Snapchat is not about how many followers you have,” the Snapchat artist Evan Garber, 27, one of the few people to make a living from Snapchat, told a reporter for Digital Music News. “It’s not about how many likes or how many comments. It’s more about the actual interaction that you have with everyone that follows you.” (Mr. Garber creates art, sometimes sponsored, on Snapchat.)

On Facebook and Instagram, the visibility of friend counts often ignites an arms race to see who can rack up the most. On these platforms, it’s also easy to follow or friend people you have never met. On Snapchat, friendship is a refreshingly intimate affair. Some prior relationship is required: You’ll need someone’s cellphone number, unique (and often cryptic) username, or to be physically in their presence so you can scan their badge. For parents uneasy about children adding strangers to their networks, this is a welcome feature.

Many teenagers use Snapchat as a proxy for texting, but it takes back-and-forth messaging to a new level: the emoji of the text universe, which can infuse only crude feeling into a message, pale in comparison to what you can bring to life on Snapchat. There, you can “face text,” combining a selfie with words. This makes conversations more connected, even more “emotional,” as one teenager told me.

Of course, Snapchat isn’t foolproof. No app is. Like all social media, Snapchat can be used as a vehicle for cruelty, and FOMO, or the fear of missing out, still afflicts users. You will surely catch a glimpse of an event you weren’t invited to, though, as Imani, 19, told me: “You may feel excluded, but at least it disappears! You can’t sit there and look at it all night and feel bad.” And not everything you send may actually disappear. Recipients of your message can screenshot the content, saving it forever in their phones (Snapchat will notify users when this happens).

Still, I’m giving this app a chance. I hope parents will, too. Spend a little time talking with your teenager about Snapchat, and you may find that beneath the cool kid exterior, there is an app here with heart and good intentions, one that is challenging some destructive norms of online life, and making the Internet a much more authentic, genuine place to hang out.

About

We're all living the family dynamic, as parents, as children, as siblings, uncles and aunts. At Motherlode, lead writer and editor KJ Dell’Antonia invites contributors and commenters to explore how our families affect our lives, and how the news affects our families—and all families. Join us to talk about education, child care, mealtime, sports, technology, the work-family balance and much more